Building a dynamically generated virtual museum using a game engine

Abstract

Summary form only given. Before the digital age, the only way for museum visitors to experience what a museum has to offer, was to actually visit it. However, this adds limitations to the visitors as not all people are able to go to certain places, or even at certain hours. Therefore, there was a need to develop a new concept of museum that will be accessible to all users, at all times, from everywhere. The answer is online virtual museums. This paper aims to describe the work in progress of creating a system that builds dynamically generated 3 D virtual museums based on the user's preferences using a video game engine. Furthermore, we describe the process we followed to build a virtual museum using virtual copies of real archaeological artifacts, describing the problems we faced and how we dealt with them. The 3 D environment of the 3 D virtual museum is a walk-through virtual space, similar to those of the first-person shooter games, which accommodates in specific positions the objects that the user has selected. In this case the user has an avatar which uses to move around in the scene, resembling user experience from the video game world. The user sees the virtual world through the eyes of the avatar and he has the feeling of being in a first-person virtual world. The user is able to walk around using the arrows keys and look using the mouse. Additionally, he is able to use the mouse to interact with objects, so as to enrich his virtual museum experience. The goal of this work is to dynamically build a virtual world containing the museum along with the items positioned in locations according to the user's preferences. The user will be able to set his/her preferences and to choose the content that he is interested in using a user friendly Graphical Unit Interface (GUI). Subsequently, a new scene will be created and introduced to the user. The system's features will include classification filters, search fields, sorting on specific attributes of the items of the museum, like chronology and location. The items used in the system are 3 D models of archaeological items created by The Cyprus Institute (CVI). Finally, our motivation for this work is to provide users a rich experience where they will explore details and information of the archaeological artifacts, that otherwise would remain "hidden", by studying the 3 D digital replicas.